Collab Lab

Collab Labs are back for a 3rd season

We’ve set the schedule for this year’s Collab Labs. In Collaboration with SafeNet Consulting, we’re kicking off the season on October 11th with a look at developing computer science talent. Through the continued support of The Commons, we’ll be back in Ward 4– now with street car service (well, tracks).

At the end of March, we met with a group of group of students from Reagan High School who were working in or looking for internships in STEM fields. We heard three key concerns:

Students want a chance to exercise the skills they’ve been developing

Students want the internship to be a chance to learn

Outside a few narrow fields, STEM internship opportunities for high school students are difficult to find

If students don’t get a chance to grow and learn, an internship is “just a job”, and those take a lot less effort to find.

In our May session we’ll dig in to the opportunities for, and barriers to, creating effective STEM internships for high school students– what it takes to create internship experiences that students value, how we raise the visibility/number of internships available in a broader range of STEM fields, and what does it look like when the goal of an internship program is talent development rather than simply low cost labor.

Come share ideas with your colleagues at public, private, and charter schools from across greater Milwaukee, as well as some folks outside of K12 who offer an interesting perspective on the topic.

Agenda

Food and beverage will be provided. There is no charge for participation but space is limited!

Featured Participants

Among others, you’ll have a chance to talk with:

Tamera Coleman– Internship Coordinator, Milwaukee Public Schools

Tamera is responsible for the development and implementation of a viable internship program at the district level. Tamera spends time facilitating student learning by assisting students to secure appropriate internships to enhance overall academic experience while learning essential skills. Tamera also initiates and builds partnerships with employers to develop student opportunities for endeavors locally. Tamera is also a proud MPS alumni, a mother of 2 young children, a wife of an educator and a Milwaukee native truly committed to youth empowerment.

Matthew Hunt– College & Career Readiness Specialist, New Berlin High School

Matt previously worked as an Account Manager in the Professional Services Division of Aerotek, the largest staffing firm in the country, where he worked with businesses across multiple industries to help them find talent in Accounting/Finance, Supply Chain, Marketing, Customer Service, and Administrative Support. He later served as a School Counselor at New Berlin West for 3 years and took a leadership role with the district’s Career and Service Based Learning Program. During the 2017-18 school year, Matt transitioned into a newly created role as the District’s College and Career Readiness Specialist and now manages Youth Apprenticeship and Internship programs at both New Berlin West and New Berlin Eisenhower high schools.

Ariana Radowicz– University Relations, Rockwell Automation

Ariana leads recruitment for Rockwell Automation’s high school internship programs as well as their scholarship/specialty programs. She also participates in ADVANCE, the company’s young professionals employee resource group and works to build a diverse pipeline of students for Rockwell’s early career programs.

Molly Schuld– Science Teacher, Ronald Reagan High School

Molly is a science teacher and a personal & professional skills teacher at Ronald Reagan High School. She came to Milwaukee through Teach For America and has now been teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools for four years. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Marine and Atmospheric Science and a Master of Education in Educational Policy and Leadership.

Molly also serves as the Ronald Reagan High School’s NAF Director for the Academy of Health Sciences, which involves connecting students to career-based learning experiences in the community. She secures STEM internship opportunities for Reagan’s upperclassmen in Milwaukee-area. Molly has also developed and continues to lead several programs including Reagan’s International Travel Program, SMART Team, and Girls In Technology Program.

Laura Schmidt, Strategic Advisor to the Superintendent – School District of New Berlin

Laura has an MBA (Leadership Studies) from Marquette University. She worked for 15 years for Northwestern Mutual and was responsible for enterprise software, usability testing, and technology research. She served as the Executive Director of an Education Foundation for 4 years before joining the School District of New Berlin as a consultant. She represents the Superintendent in local, regional and state efforts designed to support a strong talent pipeline for the benefit of students as well as the state’s economy. She holds a Scaled Agilist certification to inform strategic planning and implementation efforts.

Erica Steele– Manager, Workforce Development, Froedtert Health

Erica Steele is the Manager of Workforce Development at Froedtert Health focused on driving innovative workforce strategies internally and externally to grow and diversify the healthcare talent pipeline to meet current and future industry needs. This includes collaborating and partnering with educational institutions, workforce agencies, community based organizations, internal stakeholders, and others to identify, engage, train and create pathways for talent to enter and advance in the healthcare field. She provides subject matter expertise on the topics of workforce development, education/training, program development and management, volunteer management, public speaking and fund development.

Healthy Food Passport — Connecting Students to Food & Culture

Collab Lab 17 was a chance to further develop an idea that came out of our December session. One of the three projects proposed would engage students in real world issues around obesity and nutrition– the Healthy Food Passport. Participants in our December Lab noted that the specifics of the program would vary by age group, but the goal is to have students research a culture or cuisine and then craft a healthy version of the selected dish. Even better would be to have the students grow the ingredients. Inspired by the notion that “Food is how culture talks”, the team envisions a food fair where families are invited to sample the dishes, and stories about the dish may be shared.

Through the project, the team aims for students to gain an understanding the food production process (e.g. where food comes from), help build family connections to the school and increase exposure to different fruits and vegetables.

At this session, we used a version of the Lean Startup Canvas to guide our thinking and capture our assumptions about the goals for the project, and how it might be structured. We started the process with a discussion of the problems we are trying to address through the project, and then stepped through the remaining sections of the canvas. We closed with a discussion around the importance of starting with validation of the key assumption– that the problems we identified matter to the students engaged in the project. The end result is available here:

Thanks again to The Commons for providing the space, and to our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:

First, a bit of background…

In our conversations around makerspaces over the past year and half, we’ve heard several concerns around the cost of materials for student projects, and the effort involved to secure material donations.

Schools need material for student projects but:

They have limited budgets

It’s time consuming to track down potential donors

They can’t always find donors for what they need

There are a parallel set of concerns on the industry side. Companies are willing to donate material for use in schools but:

They don’t know always know what is useful

They don’t know who needs it

They don’t have a simple means to do so

We started exploring a model for getting excess material from industry available for use in area schools last January when we partnered with Betty Brinn to sponsor a challenge through The Commons. That work continued over the summer and fall as we experimented with pulling equipment from Gooodwill’s E-Cycling stream for tear down events to recover useful parts.

The challenge of getting excess materials to educators has been addressed in the Bay Area through a non-profit called the Resources Area For Teaching (RAFT). While they do a great job at pulling material in and packaging it up, the relationships that develop with donor companies are with RAFT. Given all the efforts we see to help schools develop relationships with area firms and career based learning experiences (CBLEs), we see that as the wrong model for Milwaukee.

We’d like to see schools use up-cycling as another point of engagement with the companies around them. The idea is to develop a network exchange model, where participants have access to materials their counterparts are able to pull in. That network could include not just K12 schools, but libraries, museums, and other organizations who can provide or use up-cycled materials for student projects.

In a network model, we need a way to create a view of inventory that is spread across nodes. It turns out that a couple of the leading thinkers on network resource planning live in western Wisconsin. They have developed an open source platform that facilitates the kind of network we envision. We’ve paired them up with a team of MSOE students who are working to tailor the application to see how it would work for us. We’re starting with the simple stuff– let me see who is in the network, and what is available.

The model we proposed looks like this:

Non-Profit consortium

Supported by membership fees

Members issued credits used to purchase material

Members set pricing (in credits) for material/services they offer

Consortium sets membership fees/credit pricing

Supported by open source NRP platform

And now, the recap…

During Collab Lab 16, we walked participants through our model and had them beat up the idea in both small group discussions and a sharing out of key points to all participants.

Participants listed the following as key questions/concerns for each player in the model:

Donors

Liability for downstream use

Transportation/Logisticcs

Visibility of need — how do we know who needs what?

Impact on student learning

Aggregators/Distributors of Donated Material

Liabilty

Compensation

Sustainable model

Space limitations within schools

Recipients

Getting the right stuff

Equitable cost structure

Ensuring equal access

Growing the network/community collaboration (share recipes)

We then prompted the discussion groups to think through experiments that could help validate potential solutions to these concerns. That generated:

A commitment from Digital Bridges to provide laptops for a tear down event at one of the schools participating, and to document the lessons learned from the process.

Involve students in understanding how to acquire donated material by having them explore potential relationships with area firms.

Start the network, learn and grow:

Start with a simple catalog

Let participants work out transportation of materials

Skip the distributor role for now

4 column spreadsheet for catalog

Promotion to potential network nodes

Communicate to actual users.

Next Steps

Quick & Dirty Has/Wants Directory

We like the idea of prototyping with a shared spreadsheet that can serve as a directory of folks at schools and other organizations that have material or skills that may be useful to others, or have something they are looking for and could use help finding it. Here it is: https://tinyurl.com/y7uas8h3

Feel free to add/edit/share. We added attendees from schools as editors, but the link is set to view only for everyone else. If you’d like access, let us know.

School/Donor Interviews

We also want a better understanding of how schools work with companies who make material donations on an ongoing basis. If you have a such a relationship, we’d like to sit down with you and your contact at the company to walk through your current process, talk through what works, and what gets in the way, and what would help make the process better. If you’d like to bring along a student who is, or would like to be involved in the process, we’d more than welcome that. We have time to schedule six of these discussions between now and the first week of March. If you’d like to be included, let us know.

Your Email (required):

School/Organization (required):

Thanks again to The Commons for providing the space, and to everyone who joined us for the insight they brought to the discussion. We had several folks from outside of K12 join us (thank you). For those who asked how you could find them, here you go:

How can we provide K12 students with opportunities to explore real world healthcare issues that have meaning for them?

We thought we’d try and find some. Last night we pulled educators from across the area together with healthcare researchers and professionals. We asked Brian King, a Collab Lab regular and former Director of Innovation for the Milwaukee Jewish Day School to facilitate. Brian’s work with students to develop and launch student run projects with a social purpose help make him the right person to guide the group through what we wanted to accomplish. In short, to generate ideas for projects that:

are meaningful to students;

allow for the participation of students from multiple schools/districts;

allow teachers and students build connections to the broader community.

The thinking here is to get beyond programs that may link a single school or small group of students to a single organization. Those connections can still happen through any of the project ideas that came out of the process. We see a better chance to scale up the number of these connections with more open-ended projects that can grow and evolve as schools find their own ways to participate based on the interests of students, drawing in new community partners at the same time.

Participants started the evening with some Post-It Note brainstorming on the top five health related issues faced by school-age children. Three volunteers grouped these by topic. We talked through each cluster, did a bit of rearranging and pulled out our blue dots for a vote on which topics were most important.

The result was three topics that would become the focus for the next stage of our work:

Stress/Mental Health

Physical Health

Obesity/Nutrition

Brian at work facilitating

Brian split the workshop participants into three groups to sketch out what a prototype program around each issue might look like. The groups talked through our threshold considerations:

What aspects of your group’s issue would be most engaging for kids to explore?

Which aspects of this issue could kids realistically research or effect change?

And then addressed our guiding questions for their prototype:

Who are the students you would involve?

What goal(s) do you have for them?

What would they do?

Where/when would this happen?

Who are the partners you’d need to bring your project to life?

Here’s what we came up with…

Stress/Mental Health

Challenge: Screen Free for 24 hours

Recognizing that the use of social media can amplify the stress of school, this project challenges both students and staff to go screen free for 24 hours. In preparation for the challenge, students/staff would lay down the ground rules for what counts as a screen, and develop plans to address tasks they currently use a screen to complete– how will we report attendance, how will students let their parents know they are ready to be picked up?

Both students and staff would document how they expect to react to a screen free day, the choices they made during the day when they otherwise may have used a screen, and a post challenge assessment of what it felt like. The project will require the cooperation and support of student’s families. Media coverage could help spur participants to live up to the challenge and encourage other schools to participate.

Physical Health

Design & Build an Adventure Playground

This project would partner high school students with those in elementary grades to design and build playground that will encourage positive risk taking and problem solving. Perhaps guided by a community planning organization, the high school students would work with a group of younger students to determine what the younger students would find engaging.

To complete the work, the project envisions connecting students to mentors who can help them with selecting a location, design, engineering, construction, marketing, and considerations for students with special needs. The team also envisioned connecting the group to mentors who could help tie the project to curriculum goals and understand the impact of design decisions on the level and type of physical activity users of the playground were likely to engage in.

Obesity/Nutrition

Healthy Food Passport

The specifics of the program would vary by age group. but the goal is to have students research a culture or cuisine and then craft a healthy version of the selected dish. Bonus points if the students grow the ingredients. Inspired by the notion that “Food is how culture talks”, the team envisions a food fair where families are invited to sample the dishes, and stories about the dish may be shared.

Through the project, the team aims for students to gain an understanding the food production process (e.g. where food comes from), help build family connections to the school and increase exposure to different fruits and vegetables.

Interested in helping move one of these projects forward?

If you’d like to get together with others to flesh out one of these projects in greater detail let us know.

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Yes! I'm interested in participating in a workgroup to look at a healthcare projectScreen Free for 24 HoursDesign & Build an Adventure PlaygroundHealthy Food Passport

We expect an initial session would run about 2 hours. What would generally work best for you?During the school dayA weekday eveningA Saturday morningA Saturday afternoonA Sunday morning

Thanks again to Brian King for facilitating, The Commons for providing the space, and to our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:

We put together our November session with help from Susan Koen and Stacey Duchrow from Milwaukee 7’s Regional Talent Partnership. In their work to help develop the talent pipeline for industry in southeastern Wisconsin, they see a number of systemic issues that get in the way of effective career based learning experiences for students. We set up the session with the aim of mapping out factors which contribute to successful CBLE’s and identifying the key places where collaborative efforts might make a difference.

For this session, we split the attendees across 5 tables, where each participant shared their thoughts on key goals, and came together as a team to share those the felt were most important with the entire group. These included:

Help students find their passion

Students/Mentors develop relationships that allow them to know each other as a person

Students Stay in School

Students are able to build 21st Century skills

Teachers are prepared and energized

We followed this with a second round of where participants shared their thoughts on key factors which help reach those goals or stand in the way. Again, each table came to a consensus on on the key factors to share out with the larger group. These include:

Students are prepared for CBLEs

Students have a voice in their learning

Students have access to a number of diverse experiences

Students have the resources (transportation, etc,) to accept CBLE opportuntities

An organization wide culture within schools supports CBLEs (as opposed to a focus on college preparedness)

Teachers have the resources they need to deliver on their end of CBLEs

Policies (state & district) support CBLEs

Leadership embraces 21st Century skills

The level of collective will (in support of CBLEs)

CBLE is part of general conciousness

Employers recognize the benefit of CBLEs

Teachers’s ability to connect curriculum to CBLEs

Schools/industry have a common understanding of what a partnership requires

All stakeholders have an equal voice

Employers have program in place to support CBLE

Teachers are prepared to be coaches

Schools/partners have dedicated resources to make CBLEs work

As we talked through each of these factors in turn, we built up a map that gave us a first draft how these factors influence each other, and thereby, the goals we have for CBLEs. We ended the session by having the participants identify, by placing dot stickers on our map, the factors they felt were most important. The key items for the group as a whole:

An organization wide culture within schools supports CBLEs (as opposed to a focus on college preparedness)

Schools/partners have dedicated resources to make CBLEs work

Schools/industry have a common understanding of what a partnership requires

Next Steps

We’ll be working with Milwaukee 7 to pull together follow on sessions to drill into each of the top three factors and from that, identify where collaborative efforts could make a difference. Interested in participating in one of these sessions? Let us know:

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Yes! I'm interested in participating in a workgroup for effective CBLEs

We expect the initial session to run about 2 hours. What would generally work best for you?During the school dayA weekday eveningA Saturday morningA Saturday afternoonA Sunday morning

Problem Finding

Bring King joined us for Collab Lab 13 to walk us through an exercise to identify problems worth solving at attendees’ schools. The idea was to give participants the feel for a process they could use with their students to identify challenges students could take on as authentic learning experiences. Thanks also go out to David Howell (MSOE/Epiphany Consulting) who, with Brian, helped us pull together the process (below).

Our participants look to take the process back to their schools to see what their students might come up with. We’re scheduling a follow up meeting at the beginning of December to re-group and share feedback from the process, see what problems students are willing to take on and, and share ideas about how to help the students dive into a problem solving exercise. If you are interested in joining in, let us know:

Name (required)

School/Organization (required)

Email (required)

The Process:

Step 1: Rapid Fire Problem Finding

Break into teams of 4 to 8 participants

On their own, each participant writes as many “problems at your school” as they can think of on note cards– one note card per problem

Collect all the note cards and put them into the bag o’ problems

Step 2: Mix and Redistribute the Cards

Shuffle the cards and distribute them equally between the teams

Each team categorizes and notes duplicates

Each team prepares a categorized list of problems to share with the entire group on a white board or large Post-it sheet.

Mixing the cards ensures that members are exposed to ideas from outside of their own team

Step 3: Large Group Sharing

Each team reports on the problems on their list

Teams share anything noteworthy about their process

The team may refine the categorization and list based on feedback from the group

Step 3a: Optional — Identify More Problems.

If the teams had a hard time coming up with an initial set of problems, prompt for additional ones to consider by asking

Are there categories of problems that are missing?

Are we missing the problems of any groups at the school (teachers, staff, administration, parents, students, neighbors) or subgroups of those (new students, minorities, impoverished students, etc.)?

Step 4: Drilling Down

In teams, but remaining all together in the room, consider the following questions:

Are there any problems on the wall that are actually dilemmas?

Are there any problems on the wall that aren’t actually problems?

Are there any problems on the wall that would benefit from re-articulation?

How might we “triage” these problems?

Is it realistic for you/your group to actually solve the problem?

Are there new problems to articulate based on your reading of all the problems?

Each team then drafts a revised list:

Based on the drill down questions, narrow to 3-4 issues and write them on a white board or large Post-it note.

Put a circled D or circled P next to each issue to identify it as a problem or dilemma

Record any problems/dilemmas that need further clarification before decision/asking

Our revised diagram highlighting key factors and adding a couple of new ones.

This was the first working session for a group of educators focused on middle school math that is part of a collaborative effort with Milwaukee Succeeds. We began our October 9th session with a silent discussion: using post-it notes to determine what is missing on the causal map, and dots to determine what three factors have the most impact on student learning. Our goal in doing so is build a model that can help us chart a course to improved student performance.

Process is important (engaging in routines and creating common language)

Temptations to resist (not putting words into students mouths)

Mindset check, reminder on what really does help a student

Actually prod student confusion, and allow students that space

If you had a chance to experiment, were you able to? What worked and what didn’t work?

Peer-peer convos, non-verbal responses, but students have a hard time explaining what they really mean beyond the algorithm

Number talks: intentionally planning these talks

Multiple ways of talking about the numbers

Thought patterns, find out where the kids are at

Kids ping-pong off each other to see each other ideas and ways of thinking about things

Kids being so ingrained in rote-memorization, have a hard time getting out of that, and that there isn’t only one way of finding the answer to the math problem

Exercise in meaningful discourse

For the bulk of the evening, Kevin McLeod from UWM’s Department of Mathematical Sciences led the group through a discourse session on a single math problem appropriate for middle school students. This helped provide context for the higher level conversation which ran in parallel around the reasoning behind the process. The problem and his notes are available to download here.

Yesterday’s Collab Lab was a joint effort with Milwaukee Succeeds. We pulled together a small group focused on middle school math– what factors lead to student success and what gets in the way. We’ll reconvene the group in October as they work as a cohort to implement the strategies we discussed. Notes from our session are below.

If you’d like to participate in a Math cohort like this, please let us know:

Name (required)

School/Organization (required)

Email (required)

I'd like to... (required)ParticipateSupport the effort

A visual recap of the discussion from Collab Lab 12 on middle school math.